Anything That Moves Me

I'm a reluctant member of Goodreads and other amateur book reviewing and rating sites, including Amazon. Maybe it's my age, although I think it's more about temperament. One of the best things about graduating from college (English major) was never having to write a research paper again, or a "book report." And that's what these sites feel like to me: a class assignment. Read More

Lisa Gornick's third published novel, Louisa Meets Bear, is that trickiest of formats: a collection of "short" stories (some novella-length) that are linked through connections between some of the characters. Read More

The House of Mirth, published in 1905, is Edith Wharton's first major work of fiction, and it established her reputation as a brilliant novelist and harsh critic of her society. Because I came to it after reading The Age of Innocence, which shows Wharton at the height of her power, I can't help giving Mirth four stars, where Innocence rated five. Read More

We don't really need another three-star review of Karen Russell's Swamplandia! Most of what I have to say about the book has been said wittily and well by other reviewers. But after mulling over my reaction to this critically acclaimed but, for many ordinary readers, disappointing book, I feel it epitomizes the problem of today's publishing world. Read More

I haven't read Swamplandia, but you exactly summarized my beef with today's literary fiction. I also think, along with Lev Grossman, that lit fic is just another genre that elevates form, experimentation, and beautiful writing over substance. Yech.

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lawless

December 21, 2012 9:54 AM EST

Thanks for commenting, lawless. It's such a rare pleasure on this lonely blog.<br><br>I don't have as negative a view of lit fic as you, if only because, as a writer, I feel an intense need to experiment, and at this point, after two "romance" novels, feel constrained by the demands of genre fiction. I don't want to spend what's left of my writing career locked into one particular format or one particular narrative style.<br><br>But I do think lit fic has become insular, to the point that it protects its own at the expense of old-fashioned storytelling. Without good storytelling, "experimentation" is meaningless, self-idulgent bs. Not all "lit fic" is bad, but if you're not already part of the in crowd, writing a good story and telling it well, in a way that readers can enjoy and follow (the sole purpose of novels, in my opinion) won't win you acceptance.<br>

Colm Toibin, in a review of a biography of E.M. Forster, derided the idea of the "honest novel" (as the biographer, Wendy Moffat, described Forster's Maurice): "novels should not be honest. They are a pack of lies that are also a set of metaphors … they are not forms of self-expression, or true confession." Read More